Great Britain (UK) Commemoration of the Return of Peace - William, Emperor of Germany 1871 

• 1871 
• Commemorative tokens 
• United Kingdom 
• Silver 

6000633

Tokens / Medals

Great Britain (UK) Commemoration of the Return of Peace - William, Emperor of Germany 1871

1871

In Commemoration of the Return of Peace

William, Emperor of Germany

28

The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which had included more than 500 independent states, was effectively dissolved when Emperor Francis II abdicated (6 August 1806) during the War of the Third Coalition. Despite the legal, administrative, and political disruption associated with the end of the Empire, the people of the German-speaking areas of the old Empire had a common linguistic, cultural, and legal tradition further enhanced by their shared experience in the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. The unification of Germany into a politically and administratively integrated nation state officially occurred on 18 January 1871 at the Versailles Palace in the Hall of Mirrors in France. Princes of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor after the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War. Unofficially, the de facto transition of most of the German-speaking populations into a federated organization of states had been developing for some time through alliances formal and informal between princely rulers—but in fits and starts, as self-interests of parties hampered the process over nearly a century of aristocratic experimentation from the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) and the subsequent rise of nationalism over the span of the Napoleonic Wars era. Unification exposed tensions due to religious, linguistic, social, and cultural differences among the inhabitants of the new nation, suggesting that 1871 only represented one moment in a continuum of the larger unification processes. The Holy Roman Emperor had been often called "Emperor of all the Germanies"; contemporary news accounts frequently referred to "The Germanies", and in the empire, its members of higher nobility were referred to as "Princes of Germany" or "Princes of the Germanies"- for the lands once called East Francia had been organized and governed as pocket kingdoms since times before the rise of Charlemagne (800 AD). Given the mountainous terrains of much of the territory, it is obvious that isolated peoples would develop cultural, educational, linguistic, and religious differences over such a lengthy time period. Germany, or the Germanies, of the nineteenth century enjoyed transportation and communications improvements tying the peoples into a greater, tighter culture, as has the entire world under the influence of better communications and transportation infrastructures.